Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

May 31, 2010

I don't often blog about games, since they don't really interest me that much, but I noticed that a few of my librarian friends from Twitter were all tweeting about 'going to Fallen London' so I thought I might tag along to see what it was all about. It's a browser based game, so nothing to download, but unlike other similar games (such as Farmville) there's a limit on the amount of time that you can spend there, so it's not the usual time sink.

The concept is simple - London has been swallowed up, and you live in a different version, populated by Rubbery Men, Tomb Colonists, Neddy Men, Araby Fighting Weasles, urchins, strange old ladies and much more. There are also different locations to visit, with various challenges to complete in order to improve various personal categories such as Persuasive or Dangerous. There is a social element in that you can work with Twitter friends to complete tasks, but even if you don't have any friends who play you can still have a lot of fun (though you do need a Twitter account to play).

I really enjoy the game - not so much for the strategy, which to be fair is rather limited, but the atmosphere is excellent - it's a mixture of Steampunk, Victoriana, Horror and slightly strange humour. It clearly attracts librarians though - not only is my character currently residing in rooms above a bookshop, he is currently on a task to rescue banned books! Screenshot below:

I don't know of any other games that are so attuned to the profession - but if you do, let me know. If you like playing games, I'd certainly suggest giving it a go, or if you like any of the genres I've mentioned, you might like this one. It's completely free to play and you may well find some of your Twitter librarian friends are skulking around somewhere!

Online Web Page Capture Tool. This one is a little bit odd. OK, more than a little bit odd. It calls itself 'a internet (sic) archive - find content from the past, or save content to the minute. Anytime, anywhere, for free'. It states that you can save pages and share them with anyone on the go, but I don't see anyway of doing that. It also says 'WJR is the only web archive that lets you see web pages exactly as it was (sic) captured'. So the Internet Archive doesn't do that then? It then goes onto say 'We're here to help the environment'. I presume so that you don't have to print pages out, but it's got some sort of pointless statement there.

I did a search for 'library' and got 5 results, so it's not exactly a hip happening resource. Really don't see what gap this is filling that can't be done by the Internet Archive, diigo et al and screenshot softwares.

New twist on Twitter searching! SnapBird is an interesting new search engine which is quite impressive. It searches back in time, past the seeming 10 day cut off that Twitter imposes. It's a much more personal search engine that the others out there, since you can search an individual's timeline, their favourites, (or yours of course), your friend's tweets, tweets mentioning you, and very interestingly, your direct messages, both sent and received.

I've not seen any other engines follow quite this line before - mostly it's what's publically available. The limitation is obviously that you can't search someone's tweets if they're protected (even if they're your friend and you're logged into SnapBird), but you can find their protected tweets if you do a 'your friends tweets' which is a bit weird, but there you go.

Bottom line: An excellent resource for finding data that you know you've seen on Twitter via friend accounts.

May 27, 2010

I've spent the morning playing around with the Tech Preview of a product called Spindex, which is currently in a closed trial - though you can contact them and ask access; it took a few weeks for my authorisation to come through. It's a Microsoft product, which uses Silverlight (if you don't have this on your machine you'll need to install it, which is a pain for those of you with closed systems). The idea is simple - you give Spindex access to your accounts on places such as Facebook, Twitter, Evernote and specific RSS feeds and Spindex will collate this information into a single searchable database. You can then update your status or more importantly, search for the information that you need.

Spindex shows you the data that you're searching for, but just from the resources that you've given to it, as well as a general search from Bing. As you'd expect being a Microsoft product, they're keen to promote their own resources. Moreover, it tells me what is trending with my friends and colleagues, and what subtrends there are. You can then view the results, and share or remember them to your Evernote account as you go. As you interact with data in the main stream column the content in the right hand side changes to take account of what you're focussed on. You can also reply/favourite/Retweet or Like as appropriate depending on the origin of the content. This is what it looks like in action:

I have to say that I really like this. It's a great way to pull your content together (can we say Friendfeed?), but the integration is better, I like the search option, the ability to tweet/facebook from the interface and the Spindex ability to pull out stuff that it thinks is interesting - your own personal trending. It's far from being perfect - the idea of putting in RSS feeds by hand when I've got a perfectly good OPML file I could use is very irritating, and I'd like it to be able to automatically pull out photographs and videos in the way that something like JournoTwit can do, but it's early days, so I'm not going to be too harsh on it.

If you're concerned about information overload, this is a product that's headed in exactly the right direction. That it's from Microsoft is also interesting, and very pleasing. Maybe the company is finally coming to grips with this whole Internet thing?

Bottom line: This has the potential to be huge, if Microsoft manage it properly, integrate it better into a much larger range of products and add greater functionality. Certainly it's one to watch.

Multiple Search Engine. It porivdes access to content from Google, Bing images, Bing, YouTube, Google, maps, Google news, Amazon(.com), Wikipedia, Twitter, Digg, LastFM, Yelp and Answers. Results are displayed in a tryptch, with search options down the left with a link to favourite sites, results in the middle/main part of the screen and images/real time, Youtube and News down the right.

It's a nice resource, which may be damning it with faint praise. They make great play of the fact that you can choose your own background image - I know this is a 'thing' for some people, and Bing gets a lot of praise for their images, but for me, and most searchers that I know it's not important. Favitt does what it does well, so it's worth trying out for that reason alone, but I'd like to see more by way of RSS feeds, help pages, multi searching, adding your own search engines and so on. These may well be in the pipeline, their 'about page' is a little cagey on developments, so we'll have to wait and see.

May 23, 2010

Facebook, privacy, security are tags that always appear together in my Delicious account. As you know, there's major league fussing over what Facebook is doing with people's data, and it's very uncool. However, it's also worth considering the fact that people have to take responsibility for their own actions, and if they post stupid stuff to their status updates, they're in a poor position to complain afterwards. So I'm not entirely sure I'm with the Openbook tagline Connect and share whether you want to or
not because you can choose to share content - not all of it I agree, but if you can work your way through the 150 or so different options of privacy on Facebook you can still keep stuff off the general net.

However, here's a shocking thought - if you don't want it public, don't write it in the first place! Using Openbook to take a look at some of the mind bogglingly stupid things that people write is quite an eyeopener. Searches for 'drunk', 'hate my job', 'I cheated' or 'I lied' bring up a wide variety of things. Maybe the authors don't care that everyone has the potential to see them, but for a lot of the time, I don't think it crosses their minds.

Anyway - it's an interesting resource and a good one to use when training and/or demonstrating the dangers of not locking down a Facebook account.

May 21, 2010

I'll admit to being a little skeptical when I took a look at BeyondAdze, for a couple of reasons. First of all, you have to register with the search engine before you can start to use it. This is not good - it's an obstacle that will stop 90%+ of people right there and then. Secondly, you get a certain number of credits per month to use for searches - want more searches, you have to pay. This isn't a good sign either, and however good the engine is - people are going to be unhappy with that whole concept. Thirdly, a search can take an hour. Yup, I know, I know.

So, with three strikes against it already, why am I still writing about it? Simply put - it's rather good. What it tries to do is to identify good quality websites first, and then particularly good pages after that. The idea is that you give it a key concept, and then other keywords to fine tune the search. It then goes off and number crunches for a while (minimum of an hour) and then throws back a whole heap of results. These results are based on site, then on pages in the site. Some of these pages are unlikely to turn up in the results you'd run with a 'normal' search, so while it's not exactly searching the deep web, it does bring you back pages you won't otherwise see.

It's also important to know that it's not giving you answers, just sites and pages that may contain the answer to your query, so to that extent it's also a little bit like directory search engines (remember those?) and so it's a two stage process.

It's a really interesting approach, but I think the aforementioned obstacles are going to cause big problems for it. However, if you have an hour to spare in order to let a search engine run around after you and then email you when it's done, give it a bash!

Search Beyond the Search Engine. Direct from the site: The Deep Web Wiki is a volunteer-led search organization that maintains a database
containing detailed descriptions of so-called "Deep Web" sites that are
either ignored or poorly indexed by the major search engines; it is
estimated that ~95 to 99% of Web-accessible content cannot be reached
using conventional web crawling methods. The Deep Web Wiki also contains
other useful information sites that often are not popular enough to
rank on the first few pages of search engine's results--despite their
value.

The Deep Web Wiki depends on the efforts of Web users to build the wiki
and improve the quality and accuracy of site descriptions. Contributions
to the index can be made either anonymously or by signing up for a free
membership that allows members to track their contributions and watch
pages of interest. To further assist in this effort, we are recruiting
topic Experts who can help point searchers to the most valuable
resources in the surface and deep Webs.

It reminds me a little of Mahalo as it used to be, with the 'expert led' resources, and a bit like Knol. (Anyone remember that Google initiative? It's still out there, believe it or not.)

However, the emphasis is on finding useful resources, so it does take a different focus. It certainly found content and databases that I wasn't aware of, so if you're really stuck and/or want to explore the hidden/invisible/deep web. this is worth a try.

Movie clips and movie scenes. I'm loving this site. Who wants to watch all the boring bits of the films, just to see the highlights? Movieclips just gives you the best clips, for free and legally, which is the important bit. Search by film, subject, actor, or scroll through a list of categories such as 'most popular', 'iconic lines', genre, mood, character and so on. Then watch the clip, and move on. Three hours later you'll realise that it was a bad idea to take my advice and visit the site.

My only gripe is that the clips start and finish abruptly - they're a little poorly edited. There are lots of movies on there, and I only found a couple that were favourites which weren't on there. Go! Explore! Have fun!